1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an information processing system constituted by an information processing apparatus including a personal computer, an information processing method of the information processing system, and a computer-readable recording medium having instructions executable by a computer to execute the information processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
As an example of an operating system (OS) running in an information processing apparatus such as a computer, there is the Windows (registered trademark) by Microsoft Corporation which includes a function called “Point & Print” (registered trademark, referred to as “P&P” in the following) for enabling plural client personal computers (PCs) (also referred to as “clients” in the following) to use a printer directly connected to a server PC (also referred to as “server” in the following) via a network, or to use the printer as a shared printer which is connected to the network.
The P&P is a function which enables a printer driver to be automatically transmitted from the server to the clients and the clients to install the transmitted printer driver. In this way, it becomes possible for each of the clients in the network to use the printer described above without the need to install the printer driver.
There is known a printer driver described above which can add a new (or additional) function to the installed printer driver. A small scale program for adding the new function to the printer driver is called a plug-in.
However, in the operation of a conventional P&P described above, even if a module of a new plug-in is added and installed to the printer driver of the server, the server does not transmit the module of the new plug-in automatically to each of the clients. In this case, there is a problem that each of the clients cannot use the function of the new plug-in without installing the module of the new plug-in to each of the clients.
Recently, an information processing apparatus has been proposed in a Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-208895, in which a module called an add-in installer for adding an add-in corresponding to the plug-in module described above accesses a print service of the OS of the server, registers an additional add-in module for the configuration information of the print service, and copies the add-in module from the server to the printer driver of the client through the print service with respect to the client.
However, the information processing apparatus described above needs to add the add-in installer, and further, after an add-in module of the add-in installer is installed, the update of configuration information of the print service of the server and a reboot process of the print service are necessary. Since the print process cannot be performed during the reboot process, it is difficult to add the plug-in to the client in an environment where an interruption of the print service for the client is not permitted.